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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers, who they were, what they did and how. This is part five of the Harold Shipman saga. In it, we come close to the end.
But before we do so, we need to reach the pinnacle of Dr. Shipman's absolute depravity. Enjoy.
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The first criminal case against Harold Fred Shipman began at Halifax Magistrates Court in February 1976. He pleaded guilty to eight offences and asked for a staggering 74 more to be taken into consideration. This was in all probability to foster goodwill from the court.
he was charged with three offenses of obtaining a controlled drug by deception three of unlawful possession of a controlled drug and two of forging declarations of exemption from prescription charges
He was fined £75 on each of the charges in order to pay the NHS compensation of £58.78 for the drugs he obtained illegally. A total of £657.78. To put the fine in perspective, the 2023 equivalent
would be around three thousand pounds in other words a fine that probably stung shipman financially as he was without a job but compared to to-day's draconian drug laws it was a slap on the wrist
Shipman was also, surprisingly, not judged to be unfit to have a license to practice medicine. The General Medical Council, the body which polices the behavior of doctors, was informed and had the option to suspend or strike his name off the register of doctors allowed to practice. But when his case came up at the relevant committee meeting, it was decided to take no action against him.
He was cautioned that any further problems would not be looked on so leniently. His case was supported by letters from both the psychiatrists he had been under and from his new employer. If a medical doctor is caught injecting himself with two hundred milligrams of an opioid daily, as well as forging documents and using patients for his own drug habit today,
he would immediately lose his license and in all probability serve prison time. By the time of his court date, Dr. Shipman had already secured a job in County Durham, more than a hundred miles away from the disgrace of Todmorden.
He joined the South West Durham Health Authority, working as a clinical medical officer. Shipman's work involved looking at children's health care in the Bishop Auckland, Crook and Willington areas of the county. He was temporarily suspended from being able to prescribe controlled substances, so he could not yet return to working as a general practitioner, a GP.
One great attraction of the job was the cheap housing. The family were given a home in Newton Acliff, eight miles north of Darlington. With Fred's court fine to pay off, there was no question of embarking on another mortgage. They paid seven pounds ten a week, just under thirty dollars in today's money,
for a brand new semi in Rolstojn Close, a cul-de-sac, and therefore a relatively safe area for the children to play in. Sarah and Christopher joined in with the other local kids and went to the local primary school, Woodham Burn. Once again, the shipments had settled in what easily can be described as English countryside idyll.
however the shipmans spent only eighteen months in newton a cliff and authorities do not suspect any foul play from dr shipman in the northeast probably because he had no access to controlled drugs
But Dr. Shippen had developed a taste for general practice, and his job with the health authority was to him a stepping-stone to being rehabilitated in the eyes of his peers. He wanted to be a GP again, and before too long a job advertisement in the British Medical Journal caught his eye. It was for a practice in Hyde.
Hyde clings to the eastern edge of the Greater Manchester Sprawl, just a kilometre or three. Beyond it is the majestic Peak District, an outstandingly beautiful area of dark peat and white limestone, wild and lonely despite its position wedged between industrial Yorkshire and industrial Lancashire.
within minutes drive of hyde it is possible to be in derbyshire cheshire lancashire or yorkshire each with its own distinct appeal the town of hyde itself is not beautiful
It isn't one of the pretty stone towns of the Peak District. Architecturally and historically, it turns towards Manchester, to the rappled industrial expansion of the 18th and 19th centuries. The town hall in the centre of Hyde is a large ornate red-brick Victorian building. Many much larger towns cannot boast such an imposing solid focal point.
The library is in similar style. Hyde, the self-important buildings proudly boast, was once successful and wealthy, a mill-town made rich in the boom years of the Industrial Revolution. Today, the town of Hyde bears the mark of a town that no longer basks in the golden light of industrial success.
Near town centre, two large high-rises, built in the sixties or seventies, rise in glaring contrast to the Victorian houses surrounding them. Rather bleak warehouses dot the edge of town. If you, dear listener, have seen the fantastic British comedy TV series The Office, not the American version, Hyde reminds me a bit of the town of Slough depicted in the show. Nondescript,
Middle of the road, an everyman kind of place. Perfect in the eyes of Dr. Shipman. Dr. Shipman arrived in Hyde in 1977 to join the Donnybrook practice. One of the seven doctors at Donnybrook, Dr. John Bennett, was retiring, and the remaining team advertised in the British Medical Journal for a replacement.
Fred was one of several applicants, all of whom were interviewed. During the interview, Shipman was upfront about his drug habit. He insisted he was sober, and he asked the panel interviewing him to trust him on that. The doctors at Donnybrook took a liking to Dr. Shipman. Shipman gave the doctors who interviewed him the name of one of the psychiatrists who had treated him for his drug addiction, and a phone call was later made.
It was a reassuring result. The psychiatrist said that Shipman was not suffering from any mental problems which would interfere with his work as a GP. Calls to the Home Office and the GMC were also reassuring. There were no restrictions in force that would affect him prescribing controlled drugs.
With these checks in place, he was offered the job with a six-month trial period and started on the 1st of October 1977. Donnebrook was an unusual practice. It was founded in December 1967 with seven doctors in town who had been split between three different practices, decided to team up in one purpose-built center in the middle of town.
The seven had been covering for each other at weekends and evenings for many years, so they were used to working loosely together. When they announced their plans, the other seven doctors in town decided that they too wanted to have better premises. So eventually a large building was erected, split into two halves, with separate entrances, one for Donnybrook and one for what would become known as the Clarendon practice.
Dr. Shipman soon proved to be industrious and popular with patients, and before long he had a patient list of 2,300, either the largest or second largest list in the entire clinic. The Shipman family soon moved to their own home in Row Cross Green, a cul-de-sac in Mottram in Longendale, an attractive village about 15 minutes' drive away from the centre of Hyde.
The area is leafy, secluded, and the surrounding roads contain plenty of large, expensive detached houses. The Shipman's Home, where they moved in in 1979, is not one of these. It is a four-bedroom semi-detached house built in the 1960s and allowed to deteriorate into shabbiness.
As with their house in Todmorden, the Shipmans no longer cared about cleanliness and tidiness. Their house was slowly filling up with debris, trash, and filth. It would have cost around twenty-five thousand pounds, well within Shipman's mortgage range, but considering his debt to authorities, it was probably the maximum of what he could afford at the time.
Having put down roots and being determined to make the best of things, they had two more children. David was born on the 20th of March 1979, and three years later, on the 5th of April 1982, Sam followed. At work, Dr. Shipman was popular with the patients, but feared by the staff.
He treated everyone he thought of as beneath him with arrogance, contempt, and often outright hostility. He had a need to prove his superiority, especially after being humiliated by the drug charges, and it was especially the clinic manager who felt his rage. She was a professional whom the other doctors appreciated and respected.
She ran the clinic well and had no complaints against her before the arrival of Dr. Shipman. For some reason, no one has figured out why, he took an instant dislike to her. Probably it was something she said, a small comment no one paid attention to, but that to him became all-important. In any case, it got so far that he refused to speak with her and forbade her to speak to him.
He ordered that communication from her to him was to be delivered in writing. In partner meetings, where all the doctors of the clinic gathered, Shipman always called for her to be fired. He did not have any proof of wrongdoing on her part, and luckily for her, all the other doctors liked her and protected her from losing her job. This probably angered Shipman even more.
It was not just the clinic manager that felt Shipman's rage. The cleaning personnel were also regularly berated by him. Nothing they did was, according to him, up to the cleaning standards he expected. This was an irony, as Dr. Shipman lived in filth at home.
He probably did not actually have anything to complain about regarding the cleaning personnel's job performance. He just wanted to demonstrate power and feel important. I mention all this, dear listener, because there is a profile of Dr. Shippen propagated by the general media which depicts him as a docile and friendly country doctor, a man who got along with everybody.
This is only true when it came to those he considered his peers or superiors. Also, he was seemingly friendly and attentive to his patients. That is, up until he murdered them. Dr. Shipman's first confirmed murder in Hyde was in August 1978, almost a year after his arrival at Donnybrook.
There was, however, a suspicious death in January of that year of a six-year-old man, and two more men who died that summer were classified by the Shipman Inquiry as having insufficient evidence for a decision. But the first classified as an unlawful killing was Sarah Marsland, an 86-year-old who died at her own home.
Tragically, her daughter, Mrs. Irene Chapman, would also become one of Shipman's victims. Almost ten years later, like so many of his victims, Mrs. Marsland died while he was present at her home, making one of his unsolicited visits. He killed again later the same month.
but seems in these early days in hyde to have been able to control his urge to kill more effectively than he would later by the end of the following year nineteen seventy nine he had murdered another five people but then stopped killing for well over a year
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For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. The reason for this pause was that he was scared of being caught. He messed up the murder of Mrs. Alice Gorton, thinking he had killed her.
standing in the living-room seemingly consoling her daughter and telling her there was no need for a post-mortem the old lady groaned with her daughter present he could not finish the job mrs gawton lay in a coma for twenty-four hours before dying now people tend to think of death by morphine to be a pleasant death and most often it is
but it can be extremely psychologically traumatizing if the dose does not kill you right away confusion pain as the palliative effects of the drug wear off and fear are usual effects when dying in this manner
The next killing, that of 77-year-old Jack Shelmerdine, worried Shipman even more. Again, it was a considerable time after the injection of morphine, in this case 30 hours before the old man died, and he had been transferred into hospital. Mr. Shelmerdine's son made a complaint against the hospital for not sending out a doctor from the geriatric unit to assess his father.
This was not a complaint against Shipman directly, but Shipman was worried that it might result in an investigation into the old man's death, including a post-mortem. He was probably very relieved when there was no post-mortem ordered, but these two narrow escapes seemed to have caused him to hold off his killing urges for some time.
When he resumed killing in 1981, the year your humble host was born, he was still very careful, murdering two people that year, none the following year, and only two in 1983. From 1984, he began to kill more frequently, and without such long breaks between killings. Between then and November 1989, he killed 57 people,
three of them within six days in the week before christmas nineteen eighty four christmas seemed to be a time when he most needed to kill this pattern was repeated the following christmas when he again killed three patients within two weeks and the following christmas when he killed two
There was another cluster of killings around Christmas 1987, with three deaths in December and another two in the first half of January. In February 1988, the death rate was cranked up to four murders within a week. There was then a gap of seven months without a killing, possibly because the four-in-one week had caused one of the other members of the staff at Donnybrook to comment.
But he was back in business by the end of the year, again killing two elderly people in the run-up to Christmas, just before they were each about to go to their families for the festive season. In 1989, he killed 12 patients. For the first time, he killed a patient in his own examination room.
It is most unusual for a patient to die while at a GP's surgery, although obviously there are occasions when it happens. As it only happened once during Shippen's years at Donnybrook, there would be no reason for any of the other medical staff to be suspicious. The victim was Mary Hamer, a lively 81-year-old widow who loved bingo and old-time dancing.
did her own housework and climbed a ladder twice a year to change her curtains she booked an appointment to see the doctor but it was unlikely to be for anything serious because she did not tell her daughter marjorie the receptionist at donnybrook remembers her coming in and looking fit and healthy but soon after mrs hamer went in to see dr
he rang reception and asked for his next patient saying he had put mrs hamer in the examination room and told her to get undressed which might take some time he calmly spent half an hour seeing two or three other patients before calling the receptionist to say that he thought mrs hamer was dead
He later told her daughter he suspected she was having a heart attack, and gave her some morphine to dull the pain, leaving her alone while he rang for an ambulance. He went back into the examination room to tell her that she was going to hospital, but found her dead. This was a blatant lie, as could have been easily discovered had there been a post-mortem.
A post-mortem would reveal lethal levels of morphine in the old lady, and if the police had questioned the receptionist, they would discover that Shipman never called an ambulance. But, as always, Dr. Shipman made sure no post-mortem was ordered. There was not the usual flurry around Christmas time, 1989. Shipman was taking a ten-month break.
Again, he stopped when he was nearly caught out. Shortly after he murdered 85-year-old Joseph Wilcoxon, the district nurse arrived, finding the body while it was still warm. Perhaps she or a member of the surgery staff made a comment. It was enough to scare him. But he murdered another two victims in 1990, by which time he was planning his exit from the Donnybrook practice.
For the whole of 1991, he resisted any urge to kill. In his 14 years at Donnybrook, he killed a total of 71 patients. And there are another 30 suspicious deaths about which the Shipman inquiry was not able to draw a firm conclusion.
The Donnybrook practice functioned efficiently and well, according to an agreement drawn up by the original seven doctors with the help of their accountants. Doctors came and went, retiring or moving on to other jobs in other parts of the country. There were never any problems until Dr. Shipman left. He betrayed the trust and confidence of his colleagues.
Although what he did was technically legal, his colleagues viewed it as unethical and immoral, and it cost all the other six doctors a substantial amount of money: over £70,000 in the first year, and at least £20,000 a year from then on. Dr John Smith never spoke a polite word to Shipman again.
Others in the practice described what he did as despicable. The Donnebruck Agreement, which, as one of the founding members, John Smith, was in part the architect of, assumed that all doctors who left would pass on their list of patients to the incoming GP taking their place. It was in this way that Shipman acquired the list of Dr. John Bennett.
When he left, he said he was planning to move to Yorkshire, but he could not find a suitable practice there. He claimed that he did not want to stay at Donnybrook because he did not agree with GP fundholding, and that, because of a loophole he had found in the contract, he was taking his list of patients with him. This hit the other six doctors hard in four different ways.
First, and most significant, because they had no list to offer an incoming GP, they could not advertise his post and replace him. This meant they lost his contribution to the running costs of the building and ancillary staff, about £20,000 a year. As these costs remained the same for six doctors as for seven, the others had to shoulder his share.
second they had to buy out his share of the building for twenty three thousand pounds they did this with a bank loan which ironically they finished paying about three months after his arrest third they had to pay shipments tax bill of almost thirty thousand pounds
because in those days tax was paid on the previous year's profits and as Donnybrook was run as a company, shipments tax was computed in with everybody else's. The company accountants approached him after he had left to pay his share of the joint bill, but he refused.
The tax bill was raised against the company, not the individuals, so there was nothing the other six could do to force him to pay. They discussed suing him, but eventually decided against it. It was by no means certain they would win, although once again their position was morally right. He had found another legal loophole to exploit.
Litigation is time-consuming and expensive, and in the end they decided it was better to accept their loss. The fourth way in which he hit the Donnybrook practice was by taking two of the staff. Although he was capable of verbally abusing and humiliating some of the staff, others were still loyal to him. He promised his colleagues that he would not poach staff, but eventually he did.
When Shipman had found his new premises, about three hundred meters away from the Donnybrook building, he left without the usual friendly send-off. You, dear listener, have probably experienced this if you have ever worked at an office. There's cake, maybe some soda, and the boss or a close colleague holds a cringy speech. None of this was the case with Shipman. He just packed his things and left.
His relationship with his former partners was hardly warm. Dr. Harold Fred Shipman moved into his clinic that he called The Surgery in July 1992 with a ceremonial opening and a good deal of publicity.
Compared to Donnybrook, it is an unprepossessing building, a shop among a row of shops, lifted out of ordinariness by an attractive green-painted wrought-iron architrave running the length of the block. The location is good, just over one hundred metres away from the market square and the town hall, on the main road through the centre of Hyde. Shipmen leased the premises and paid three hundred pounds a week for it.
Five out of the astonishing total of one hundred and forty-three patients who were murdered during his years running his own practice were killed in his clinic. These were murders he savored above the others. In his clinic, he was the supreme dictator, the king of his domain. There he could do what he wished, when he wished it, and how he wished, and no one to bother him.
The first to die there was Joan Harding, a fit, active 82-year-old whose only health problem was a pain in her shoulder. Her friend, who was waiting outside in her car, was told by the staff that Joan died while she was having her blood pressure taken. Friends wondered at the time why there was no attempt to resuscitate her.
But they accepted it when the doctor said she had a massive heart attack, which could have happened at any time. Bertha Moss, known as Betty, was the next patient to be murdered on his own premises. She was only 68 when she died and went to the doctor's to have a heart check-up. She met her sister-in-law at a market on the day she died and looked a bit off-color, but there were no real worries about her health.
Three months later, another old lady went to see the doctor she trusted and liked, and she, too, never made the journey home from 21 Market Street. Dora Ashton was 87, but fit enough to walk the half-mile to the surgery. She was taking tablets for a heart condition, so her family accepted it when they were told by Shipman she had had a stroke.
Eight months later, Edith Brady called in for her regular three-monthly vitamin B12 injection for pernicious anaemia. 72-year-old Mrs. Brady was a familiar sight at Shippy's Surgery, as patients lovingly called Shipman's Clinic.
Brady, who was a little lady less than five feet tall, was murdered by Shipman quickly after she had sat herself on the examination table. He injected her with morphine without ceremony, and she probably knew something was terribly wrong when the morphine started to take effect and before she lost consciousness and her life.
There was a gap of a year before the next patient died at this surgery. Perhaps Shipman was worried that his staff or other doctors in the area would be suspicious of so many deaths on the premises. But in May 1997, 63-year-old Ivy Lomas walked in for a routine check on a pain in her arm and never walked out again.
after shipman took her through to the treatment room and injected her he dealt with three other patients before telling his staff that she had died he told different stories to different members of his staff and to the policeman sergeant philip reed who was called when the receptionist could not track down any of mrs lomas's family
When Sergeant Reed was puzzled that he had not tried to resuscitate her, Shipman said, and I quote, This lady was beyond resuscitation. She was quite clearly dead. End quote. And with that, we come to the end of Part 6 in this sojourn into the life and crimes of Dr. Harold Shipman. I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. Next episode, we'll see the end of his saga,
So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. What follows is a message to my dear Norwegian listeners in Norwegian. I remind you that my Norwegian-language podcast, Serimordepodden, is available and listened to both on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all other places you listen to podcasts. As they say in Radio Land, follow along.
I don't know.
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